Effect of payload size on goodput when message segmentations occur for wireless networks: Case of packet corruptions recovered by stop-and-wait protocol

Abstract: This paper investigates the effect of payload size on goodput for wireless networks where packets created from a message through a segmentation function are lost due to bit errors and they are recovered by a stop-and-wait protocol. To achieve this, we derive the exact analytical form of goodput using the analytical form of a packet-size distribution, given a message-size distribution and a payload size. In previous work, the packet sizes are assumed to be constant, which are payload size plus header size, although actual segmented packets are not constant in size. Hence, this constant packet-size assumption may be not justified for goodput analysis. From numerical results, we show that the constant packet-size assumption is not justified under low bit-error rates. Furthermore, we indicate that the curves of goodput are concave in payload size under high bit-error rates. In addition, we show that the larger mean bit-error burst length yields less concave curves of goodput.